Archive for Aug 2009

Over the weekend, Travis Hartwell tweeted "I would try out Kynetx, but it appears the required plug-in Azigo is not available for Linux." Alas, It's true that Azigo doesn't support Linux. Still, there are some ways to use Linux to develop and deploy Kynetx apps. In fact, I do all my development on Linux. We call the way that a Kynetx app is deployed an "endpoint." The endpoint is responsible for initiating the call to KNS and mediating the interaction with the client. The details of the execution model are available online. There are several ways that Kynetx appsContinue reading...

Last Friday I blogged about using Kynetx to put my latest tweet on my blog. Joseph Scott asked "Why would this be better than just using Javascript plus the Twitter API to show your last tweet?" The answer is a little longer than I wanted to put in a comment, so here goes. KRL has a number of advantages over Javascript talking to the Twitter API: KRL, the Kynetx Rule Language, provides a closer abstraction to the task than Javascript does as a general purpose language. This is, of course, something that could be subject to debate--if you're alreadyContinue reading...

I've had a box on the right-hand side of this blog showing my lastest tweet. Today I realized that it would be better powered by Kynetx. I took a few minutes and wrote one up. You can see it on the right-hand side of this page. To do this, I used the Twitter API to grab my tweets and then replaced an empty div on my page with it. Since Kynetx rules run each time the page is loaded, it's constantly updated. The first step was to declare a datasource to read my tweets: global { datasource tweets I'veContinue reading...

Sorry for the short notice, but it turns out that I'm going to be out of town on Thursday and Friday next week. Consequently, I'm going to have the CTO breakfast this Friday in the usual place: Mountain View room, Novell Cafeteria (Building G) in Provo. We'll start at 8am and go until everyone is bored. Here are the upcoming breakfasts: August 19, 2009 (Friday) September 24, 2009 (Thursday) October 30, 2009 (Friday) December 3, 2008 (Thursday) - combined November & December breakfast I hope you can make it. Contact me with any questions.Continue reading...

If you visit IT Conversations you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's Silona Bonewald week. Completely independently Jon Udell and I both decided to have her on our shows and scheduled her for the same week. View that as an indication of the fact that she's an interesting person. Jon talked to Silona about Citability.org, an effort to get permalinks in government documents. Scott and I talk to Silona about open banking, an effort to make banking more open and accountable. So, pop on over to IT Conversations and help us celebrate Silona Bonewald Week!Continue reading...

I haven't updated Quicken on my Mac since 2006. Yeah, I know, but it does what I want. The program is that my version of Quicken only export QIF format files and Quicken on Windows apparently hasn't supported importing those since 2005 or something. The problem was that I needed to get some information about my credit card account to my accountant. If you google around, you'll find people who sell programs that convert QIF files to Excel that they want real money for (like $60). Forget that. Especially when I've got Perl at my beckContinue reading...

We've opened registration for Kynetx Impact 2009, our developer's conference. You can register here for the event. We've changed the dates to November 18-19th (I previously announced dates in October) to better fit with some other conference schedules. We're charging a small fee to cover food, but if that's problem for you contact me about a scholarship. Doc Searls will give the opening keynote and Craig Burton will give the closing keynote. Here is a list of topics we'll cover: Building Apps with KRL (Kynetx Rule Language) Advanced Rule Writing Introduction to Action & Information Cards Leveraging Data setsContinue reading...

If you're a Ubiquity user, Mike Grace has created a Ubiquity script to run Sweetter. Note that regardless of whether this is running as a bookmarklet or a Ubiquity script, it's still executing KRL in the cloud which delivers Javascript to the browser. All the bookmarklet or Ubiquity script is doing is planting tags to make the call to KNS.Continue reading...

One of the ways that you can use Kynetx rules is to create powerful bookmarklets that modify the current page in some way. In order to demonstrate this, I asked our intern, Jessie Morris, to create a ruleset that displays the last 10 tweets about a Web site. We call this little App "Sweetter." Sam has already built a feature for generating a bookmarket that is tied to a ruleset into Kynetx AppBuilder, our ruleset building tool. So once you've got a ruleset, creating a bookmarklet is as easy as pushing a button. To see it in action, justContinue reading...